Woodrow Wilson

Associated Press

Updated: Oct. 1, 2010

By John Milton Cooper Jr.

Overview

Each December 28 a military honor guard and a procession of clergy present a wreath at a tomb in the National Cathedral in Washington, D. C. The wreath bears two words: "The President." The tomb holds the remains of Woodrow Wilson, and the day is his birthday. Wilson is the only president buried in Washington and the only one buried inside a church. The location is fitting, as is the military honor guard, because no president combined the elements of religion and war leadership more strongly than Wilson.

Since his death, no president has had a reputation with more ups and down than his. Most of these posthumous fluctuations have derived from his roles in World War I: his decision to intervene in 1917; the ways he waged war, particularly the repression of civil liberties at home; and the peace settlement he helped negotiate, especially his establishment and advocacy of collective security through the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.

In addition, his administration's record in race relations was sorry, including an attempt to segregate federal offices. In the post-war disillusionment of the 1920s and 1930s, many blamed him for doing the wrong thing by entering the war. Later, in the 1940s and 50s, some blamed him for not taking the country into war sooner.

"Realists" have persistently scorned his plans for the League of Nations as foolishly idealistic and possibly inspired by religious-based views of himself as a secular messiah. Liberals and free speech advocates have deplored his wartime actions, especially because he feared and predicted what he allowed to happen. Yet, during most of this time, he has also had strong admirers and defenders who have praised his actions in most areas and pointed to the contexts in which he thought and acted. Controversy still rages over who he was and what he did, and "Wilsonian" remains a widely used term, though most often pejoratively.

Political Scholar

It might seem odd for this man to be buried in an Episcopal cathedral. He was the son, grandson, nephew, and son-in-law of Presbyterian ministers. Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia and South Carolina, he was the only southerner to be elected president for nearly a hundred years after the Civil War. He received his college education at Princeton and studied law at the University of Virginia. After a brief stab at practicing law, he went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and would be the only holder of the Ph.D. degree and the only professional academic to become president.

In his writings he established himself as the leading political scientist of his generation and one of the few great scholars of politics that the United States has produced. He taught briefly at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan (Connecticut), then returned to Princeton, where he taught for 12 years before becoming its president. In his eight years as president, he transformed Princeton into a front-rank university by upgrading the faculty, revamping the curriculum, and launching ambitious initiatives to reform college life; thereby, he made himself the best-publicized and often most controversial college president in the country. This public visibility attracted political kingmakers, who tapped him to run as the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey in 1910.

Governor Wilson

Wilson instantly made a huge success in politics. Despite having been picked by his state's political bosses, he ran as a progressive reformer, and, once in office, he pushed through a major program to clean up politics and regulate business. People marveled at how this professor did so well in politics, and he had a stock answer for reporters who asked him about it: after academic politics, the "real thing" was so much easier and aboveboard. He also applied lessons and approaches he had gathered from his academic study of politics. Having concluded that parliamentary governments acted more efficiently and accountably to the people, he acted like a prime minister as governor and president. He became the first holder of either office to draw up a legislative program in advance, then he worked through his party to get his programs enacted. The theorist of party government became the practitioner of party government, and no career in the history of the United States has better justified the study of politics as preparation for the practice of politics.

Presidential Campaigner

Wilson's success as governor made him an early favorite for the Democratic nomination for president in 1912, which he won after a hard-fought campaign. Next, he profited from the split in the Republican party between the incumbent president William Howard Taft and his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, who was running as the nominee of his new Progressive Party. The campaign's main event was Wilson versus Roosevelt, and it featured the finest intellectual exchange between candidates in all of American history. Wilson, under his slogan of the New Freedom, expounded a vision of social and economic renewal to be achieved through government intervention to restore competition; Roosevelt, under his slogan of the New Nationalism - which sought to tame big business -, expounded a vision of transcendent national purpose to be fostered through government oversight and regulation of big business. Wilson won an electoral landslide, although he captured only 42 percent of the popular vote; Roosevelt finished ahead of Taft, thereby becoming the only third-party candidate ever to outpoll the nominee of a major party.

Wilson Presidency

As president, Wilson prized legislative leadership highest above all other aspects of his office. In a symbolic move to bridge the separation of powers, he became the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person, and during the rest of his presidency he regularly went to the Capitol to address major issues. In his first two years in office, he oversaw passage of such monumental measures as the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and anti-trust legislation; in his second two years, despite decreased Democratic majorities in Congress, he oversaw passage of the first federal aid to farmers, abolition of child labor (later struck down by the Supreme Court), the first inheritance taxes, and an eight-hour day law for railroad workers, as well as the nomination and Senate confirmation of Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court---the first Jew to sit on the Court and arguably one of the two or three greatest justices in its history. These legislative accomplishments played a big role in Wilson's re-election in 1916. He became the first Democrat to win a second consecutive term since Andrew Jackson, and he did it in the face of a reunited Republican party, which enjoyed a much stronger following in the most populous states.

Foreign Relations

Another element in Wilson's re-election was foreign policy. The Democrats used the campaign slogan "He Kept Us out of War," although it swayed fewer votes than domestic issues. Just after his election in 1912, Wilson had said privately, "It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems." That irony began to overtake him almost at once. The ongoing and violent revolution in Mexico vexed him, as he fumbled and intervened there unwisely before settling on a policy of letting Mexicans work out their own destiny. That trial run served him in good stead when World War I broke out in August 1914. It could not have happened at a worse time for Wilson, because his first wife Ellen died at exactly the same moment and left him distraught with grief. At first, the world war seemed far away, but on May 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the world's largest passenger ship, the Lusitania, with more than 100 Americans among the 1,200 killed. That began a protracted diplomatic duel with Germany, in which Wilson repeatedly tried to bridge the classic dilemma between peace with honor, and he succeeded temporarily when the Germans restrained their submarines. Also fortunately for Wilson, he had met and soon married his second wife, Edith. Early in 1917, the Germans unleashed their submarines in an all-out campaign against all merchant shipping, both Allied and neutral, and their move forced a reluctant, doubtful president to take the country into war.

Wilson at War

Ironically, Wilson made the decision to intervene after he had embraced a new way to conduct international relations and prevent war through a league of nations, and after he had made a bold move to end the war by offering mediation and a "peace without victory." Despite his yearning for peace and reluctance to go to war, Wilson mounted a full-fledged military effort. In the 18 months, the Army mobilized over 4 million men and sent 2 million of them to France to fight in the last months of the war. His administration likewise mobilized and took unprecedented control of the economy, including manufacturing, transportation, and food production. Wilson gave his cabinet officers and other appointees great latitude in running their departments, and he left military affairs to the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. Pershing.

Fourteen Points

In foreign affairs, however, he exercised direct control, and he seized command of Allied war aims in January 1918 with his Fourteen Points address, in which he laid out a picture of a healing, non-punitive program reminiscent of "peace without victory." The Fourteen Points contributed measurably to shortening the war, which ended with the Armistice of November 11, 1918. Winning the war proved easier for Wilson than winning the peace. He became the first president to leave the United States while in office when he went to Paris for the peace conference at the end of 1918. Except for a brief trip home, he stayed there until the summer of 1919, entangled in protracted, stressful negotiations with the British, French, and Italian leaders.

The resulting Treaty of Versailles struck many as an abandonment of the Fourteen Points, although the British, French and Italian Allies fell short of their sweeping demands to impose a crushing settlement. The treaty did include the Covenant of the League of Nations, which Wilson drafted and on which he pinned his greatest hopes for future peace and order. At home, however, he faced entrenched opposition to full-fledged participation in the League, particularly from the Republican leader in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. In seeking approval of the treaty, Wilson first tried to negotiate with senators. then mounted a barnstorming speaking tour across the country. The tour had to be aborted as his health collapsed, and he suffered a massive stroke shortly after his return to the White House.

Impaired President

That stroke effectively ended Wilson's presidency, and he never fully functioned in the office again. The stroke turned him into a rigid, often delusional creature who blasted all efforts at compromise on League membership. Sadly, Wilson spun fantasies about running for a third term in 1920, which his family and friends quietly scotched. Even without him as a candidate, the Republicans made him the main issue in the campaign, and they read the landslide victory of their nominee, Warren Harding, as a repudiation of Wilson and all his works, including membership in the League. Wilson lived on for nearly three years after he left the White House. He and Edith bought a house in Washington, which served as a refuge and shrine to his memory, a place to which a steady stream of admirers made pilgrimages. He died on February 3, 1924, from the long-term effects of the stroke. He was buried in the cathedral because the Episcopal bishop of Washington wanted to make it America's Westminster Abbey, and Mrs. Wilson, who was an Episcopalian, liked the idea.

Quick Facts: Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born Dec. 29, 1856, in Staunton, Va. He attended Davidson College, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and the University of Virginia Law School. He received a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University in 1886. Wilson's first wife, Ellen Louise Axon Wilson, died Aug. 6, 1914. They had three daughters, Margaret, Jessie and Eleanor. In 1915, he married Edith Bolling Galt.

John Milton Cooper Jr.

John Milton Cooper Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of "Breaking the Heart of the World: Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations" and "The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt," among other books. He was recently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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